A good way into public understanding of science in the UK is to think back to 20 March 1996. It was Science Week, when the nation’s schools, rail stations and shopping centres benefit from a host of events designed to show that science is sexy, and you can probably do it on your kitchen table. And after a day learning that arthropods are awesome or physics is phun, thousands of people came home to watch Newsnight, on which the unhappy health minister Steven Dorrell was passing questions about what was to be done about a frightening health hazard to his reassuringly urbane scientific adviser. I can still remember Dorrell visibly controlling his reaction when the adviser used the word ‘epidemic’. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) had just officially mutated into new variant CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), and the mad cow crisis was a real threat to humans.

It was a classic reminder of Harold Macmillan’s dictum that what politicians should fear is ‘events, dear boy, events’. And it was an unforgettable illustration of the limitations of one agenda for the public understanding of science, and of the reasons for its gradual displacement by another. Phase 2 of the BSE crisis taught more people more about science - and its limitations - than any number of Science Week demonstrations. With hindsight, it helped crystallise a change in thinking about science and its publics. The simple assumption underlying much effort to take science to the public had been that lay people needed a better grasp of basic facts. With such a stark demonstration that facts can change, the focus shifted to who was choosing the facts which were supposed to be important, and what the limitations of the underlying science might be.

Of course the public understanding of science landscape harbours many more creatures than mad cows, and the full story is more complex. But the endurance of BSE, which was first observed just a year after the Royal Society published the Bodmer committee's report in 1985 and is still claiming human victims, makes it a powerful symbol for some of the abiding tensions between science and society. BSE and CJD are said to have dented trust in science and scientific advice, yet science is our best hope of controlling the diseases, and millions have been spent on new research into prions. At the same time, official pronouncements about subjects like genetically modified food, measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination, or bioterrorism are routinely greeted with scepticism.

The Bodmer Report was the product of a time when the scientific community feared public indifference more than animosity. There were no votes in basic research, and funding was shrinking - or at least static, which researchers tend to perceive as the same thing. A better-informed public would be more inclined to support science, and the technologies it helps generate. And increasing public understanding of science would be good for recruiting future researchers, and good for the economy. Informing the citizenry for democratic debate was in there, too, but was not exactly a priority for the Conservative government then firmly installed in Downing Street.

The response to Bodmer suggested that the report had struck a chord, with the scientific community at least. The Royal Society joined with the British Association and the Royal Institution - two other organisations with hefty historical baggage and a long history of concern about understanding science - to form COPUS, the Committee on Public Understanding of Science. The Economic and Social Research Council won backing for a research programme on PUS, including a national survey of ‘scientific literacy’. This duly showed that most people knew woefully little about even simple science, and newspapers bemoaned the numbers who apparently believed that the Sun goes round the Earth or that antibiotics kill viruses.

But this kind of thing quickly attracted criticism as too simple a view of the matter. Why, some asked, did people need to know these things in any case? Was scientific literacy inherently more important than, say, economic literacy? The problem with the so-called deficit approach was that people might make rational decisions to ignore much of science because the entry cost was too high, although they seemed adept enough at mastering technicalities when it suited them. Prescribing what people ought to know might be OK in schools (and the National Curriculum, which was gestating around the same time, was nothing if not prescriptive), but adults would not respond to a top-down approach rooted in an assumption that they were ignorant. Even if they did, agreeing what scientific literacy might cover would be hard, and delivering it to any significant proportion of the population seemed unlikely to happen.

So although lots of scientific institutions and research establishments launched PUS initiatives which were ostensibly aimed at promoting scientific literacy, while combining this with enthusiastic promotion of their own work (as, understandably, many still do), it became clear that questions of risk, trust and mutual respect were going to make the whole field of public understanding a good deal more complex than a simple sales pitch might suggest. And, in what became a useful new slogan, scientists’ understanding of the public was as much of a priority as public understanding of science.

Other shifts in language around the topic give some idea of the arguments which have gone on since Bodmer. At various times, would-be agenda-setters have spoken of public understanding, public awareness, public appreciation, public access, and - most recently - public engagement. New Labour brought a new vocabulary of stakeholders, citizenship, transparency and participation. This more explicitly democratic agenda can take a comical turn, as with the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee’s recent discovery that the Royal Society is an elite organisation - well, fancy! But it was laid out more coherently in the earlier House of Lords report, Science and Society (a phrase previously heard on the lips of radicals in the 1960s), which argued strongly that there was a need for ‘dialogue’ between these two great abstractions.

Many people involved in public understanding of science are still trying to work out what that means in practice - it is an easy goal to endorse, a hard one to realise. At the very least, it implies more interaction, more opportunity for interested citizens to pose questions and make their views known. Responses to this demand include opening up decision making in advisory committees and research organisations. In some ways, these are big changes. Minutes of meetings which would once have been confidential are now often posted on the web, and many organisations have occasional open meetings.

Beyond this, a range of methods for consulting non-experts about science-related decisions are coming into use, including (again) web-based exercises, and intensive discussions like consensus conferences and citizens’ panels. The emphasis is on deliberation, on experts who help out but do not assume that they set the agenda.

It is still possible for critics to see all this as window-dressing for a system in which elite decision makers operate in much the same way they always did. The charge is easier to raise in science because research organisations still tend to draw the line at lay involvement in peer review of proposals. And in an era when image management concerns every organization, all the time, moves toward openness in other matters will go along with organised attempts to ‘spin’ for science, an accusation made against the new Science Media Centre based at the Royal Institution.

But that just means the world is complicated, and no single trend dominates an area with as many facets as public understanding of science. That shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that there has been real change, and better appreciation of the issues, since the early days of a crusade to abolish ignorance. BSE was a national tragedy, which continues to produce a steady stream of personal tragedies. But maybe a little good came of it, too.

See also

• Time to talk: Article on scientists’ perception of science communication.

External links

• BBC News Online (27 October 2000) headline reads Dorrell regrets BSE statement
• Search the Royal Society’s library catalogue for reference details of the 1985 Bodmer Report
• COPUS: Committee on Public Understanding of Science.
• The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee
• Science and Society: House of Lords Science and Technology - Third report (14 March 2000)